Eurocop unmasked

Add his physical attributes to the gravitas that a German accent brings, and it is easy to picture the director of Europol, the EU’s somewhat secretive police agency, warning his officers about what will happen if details of a particular investigation leak out.

There is an unmistakable aura of mystique surrounding Europol headquarters in The Hague. The agency’s work rarely features in anything other than the most specialist publications. Its website is not exactly overburdened with information, and its press officers have a reputation for being tight-lipped.

“If you phone them and say ‘how are you’, they’ll reply ‘I’m not sure I’m allowed to tell you that’,” one journalist remarked – only half-joking.

Yet Storbeck himself brushes aside criticisms that he is cultivating a culture of obsessive secrecy.

Campaigners for transparency regularly approach Europol to request documentation concerning its activities. “We give it, as long as it’s not confidential or restricted,” he shrugs.

The campaigners concur that his door is indeed partly ajar, but feel he is constrained by the system from prising it open further.

“Mr Storbeck – from what I have seen of him – is doing a straight job,” remarks Tony Bunyan, editor of civil liberties bulletin Statewatch. “Within the terms of reference, he is prepared to go and speak as openly as he can.

“But the issue is not Mr Storbeck. The problem is that Europol continuously has new roles dumped on it without there being proper accountability.” Bunyan points out, for example, that MEPs do not have the power to summon Europol representatives to appear before European Parliament committees.

One of those new roles has been to exchange data with the US on suspected terrorists. According to Bunyan, this goes beyond the provisions in the 1995 Europol Convention, which govern the agency’s activities and state that there should be no data handed over to countries outside the Union.

The new powers have arisen primarily in response to the 11 September 2001 attackson New York and Washington. Evidence that planning for them was carried out in EU member states has given fresh impetus to Europol’s anti-terrorist work.

A voluminous file on al-Qaeda suspects has been compiled by Europol. Storbeck says this includes documents unearthed during searches of apartments and houses by national police in EU countries. “It is raw material, much of which is in Arabic or Turkish. All the information is being evaluated and this work can only be done in an agency such as Europol.”

He also lets slip that Scottish police recently sent him valuable information about a particular suspect, but declines to divulge further details. And the American authorities have forwarded a “quite full dossier” concerning their 11 September investigation. Cooperation with the US, he admits, has posed difficulties in the past because of the differences in data-protection laws. But Storbeck says that an accord on exchanging personal data with US law-enforcement agencies, signed in December 2002, should lead to concrete improvements.

While Europol cannot yet claim a major coup in the fight against terrorism, it has notched up successes in its work against organized crime. Operation Girasole, which focused on Ukrainian gangs trafficking women into the EU, who were then forced into the sex trade, has resulted in some 80 arrests.

Although Storbeck had a lengthy career in the German police before his appointment as coordinator of the Europol Drugs Unit (which evolved into Europol) in 1994, one specialist in justice and home affairs argues he comes across as “a fonctionnaire rather than a cop”.

“He’s quite guarded in what he will and will not say,” the source adds. “He’s not somebody who gives you loads of juicy information. And that partly reflects what Europol does. It is effectively a database and something that coordinates operations. It doesn’t have beat police officers [on the street].”

That said, the gradual increase in Europol’s powers now allows it to participate in investigation teams set up within member states and to ask national police forces to conduct certain inquiries. Its work programme for 2004 envisages that it will focus more on operations than drawing-up strategies. This proposes that member states should increase its annual budget from €53 million to €59m and give it 20 new staff, bringing the total to 331. The additional money and muscle are needed to cope with the demands of the Union’s eastward expansion.

Asked if he feels that his office has the wherewithal to be effective, Storbeck responds: “Have you ever heard a policeman say he has enough resources? But if we had too many staff and too much money, we would not work in as cost-efficient a way as we do at the moment.

“We have learned to save money and the internal management is much better than it was some years ago.”

However, Jelle van Buuren, founder of Dutch civil liberties group Eurowatch, has obtained documents from his country’s police which express scepticism about whether Europol constitutes ‘added value’ for national forces.

Storbeck would obviously dispute that. Indeed, he hopes that the future of Europe Convention, chaired by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, will delineate the EU’s role in justice and home affairs more clearly than is currently the case.

He admits, though, that he is not entirely happy with a paper prepared by a Convention working group chaired by John Bruton, Ireland’s former taoiseach (prime minister). Bruton’s blueprint fails to grapple enough with how Europol should interact with OLAF, the Union’s anti-fraud office, and Eurojust, its judicial network, he feels.

“It’s not yet totally clear with whom Europol should work in supporting an investigation. Should this be, for example, the prosecutor in Paris or the national prosecutor in Belgium or Eurojust?”

Despite wanting to see Europol’s remit broadened, Storbeck does not envisage it evolving into a fully-fledged pan-European police force in the foreseeable future. “The real investigations or coercive measures are something for member states. It has to be like this. There isn’t a common law procedure and there isn’t a common penal law [across the EU].”

Storbeck, whose current five-year term at Europol is due to end next year, acknowledges that being a policeman was “not my life wish”. He gives the impression he almost fell into his profession by accident; after studying law, he was working as a notary in the German interior ministry, when the opportunity to undertake temporary work for the federal police arose.

A father of two, his extracurricular activities reveal a fascination with the past. While his wife is a psychotherapist by professsion, she has passed on her passion for fine architecture to him. The couple enjoy pottering around old towns and cities in their spare time. He is also a classical music aficionado but is extremely choosy, stating that he does not enjoy anything composed after the late 18th century.

“I have some problems with [Austro-Hungarian Arnold] Schönberg and very modern music.” (For the uninitiated, Schönberg’s first compositions date from the turn of the 20th century.)

Nevertheless, he is somewhat more relaxed about his literary tastes. He admires American author John Irving and reads a range of British authors. “If I read in the English language, it is just for fun.”